200 Women

Marama Fox was born in Hamilton, New Zealand. She has taught at Māori-language immersion schools aimed at fostering an understanding of Māori language, culture and wisdom, and in public secondary schools. Fox was an advisor to the Ministry of Education before being elected to the New Zealand Parliament in 2014; she is a representative* and co-leader of the Māori Party.

Q: What really matters to you?

Our Māori children – I went into politics to help our nation remember how to love our children. It is time to correct the disparity that exists between Māori and Pākehā – between indigenous New Zealanders and those descended from European settlers. People have to listen to the realities of what it means to be Māori, so that we can develop and implement better policies that help our children realise their aspirations. I want our children to know how great they are – to stand up and embrace the greatness of their ancestors and their achievements. So, I am paving the way for my children’s generation to take back their narrative.

For a long time, I myself held negative perceptions of my people and thought I had a great Western education; I learned about Elizabeth I and about the wonderful settlers who colonised New Zealand. I had intended to go to university, but I had a baby instead. It was when I took my son to kōhanga reo that I was exposed to a Māori world view. Kōhanga reo is a Māori language nest – a pre-school – hosted by our elders in an effort to revive our language. They invite mothers to bring their children along to be spoken to in te reo Māori and to be schooled in the knowledge of our people. It felt like someone had taken off the top of my head with a can opener and had started pouring in all this knowledge. Oh, my gosh, my brain!

Ice Bear: The cultural history of an arctic icon

If art’s mission is to change public perceptions or to transcend established practices, it can no longer be apolitical, unaware of social or economic currents. The creators of an exhibit that examines the “cultural afterlife” of taxidermised polar bears (nanoq: flat out and bluesome, by Bryndís Snæbjörnsdóttir and Mark Wilson) sum up a rather recent shift in our attitudes toward their subject: “During the last decade the image of the polar bear has moved in the public imagination from being an icon of strength, independence and survival in one of the most climatically extreme of world environments, to that of fragility, vulnerability and more generally of a global environmental crisis.”

Donald Gialanella’s ‘Spirit of the North,’ concept for a sixty-foot sculpture welded from scrap automobiles for a downtown park in Fairbanks, Alaska. (Donald Gialanella)

Their latest project, Matrix, focuses on the bears’ maternity dens in Svalbard, “perfectly adapted model[s] for habitat in the arctic environment.” Since the Rodin pupil Francois Pompon’s L’Ours Blanc (1922), the language of polar bear art has changed, as have its approaches. Read more »